Anthro Dept likely to divide into two: 5/20/98

Anthropology Department likely
to split

BY KATHLEEN O'TOOLE

Stanford's 50-year-old Department of
Anthropology will likely become two separate departments beginning
next academic year ­ the Department of Anthropological Sciences
and the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology.

A majority of the department's
faculty expressed support for the division in early February under
terms outlined by the dean's office, according to Hans Andersen,
the cognizant dean in the School of Humanities and Sciences. The
proposal has since been approved by the dean of humanities and
sciences and has been considered by the Advisory Board of the
Academic Council. It is now on the provost's desk. If the division
is approved, new degree-granting authority will be requested from
the Faculty Senate next year, beginning with reviews by the School
of Humanities and Sciences Curriculum Committee and the senate's
Committees on Undergraduate Studies and Graduate Studies, Andersen
said.

The decision to divide the highly
rated department comes on the heels of a much publicized conflict
last year over the tenure case of one faculty member, but reflects
longer term tensions rooted in diverging interests, methods and
theory within American anthropology, sources on and off campus
said.

"This is a great example of how
local processes are shaped by larger global processes as well as
having their own specific history," said Sylvia Yanagisako, acting
chair of the Cultural and Social Anthropology Department. "American
anthropology has since its beginning in the late 19th century had
this uneasy configuration of four subfields," she said. "European
anthropologists have always regarded the situation as an accident
of American history."

Anthropology as a discipline has not
resolved how to study "a living organism with culture ­ how to
do both the biology and culture of the human organism," said Bill
Durham, chair of the Anthropology Department and acting chair of
the new Department of Anthropological Sciences. Integrating
biological approaches into a department that was traditionally
strong in social and cultural anthropology, he said, has been
difficult at Stanford dating back at least to the late '70s when
filling his own position was a two-year struggle.

Both departments will cross-list
each other's courses, but graduate student admission and faculty
appointment decisions now will be separated. The new Cultural and
Social Anthropology Department will have 10 faculty billets. The
new Anthropological Sciences Department will have seven faculty
billets, Andersen said. The staff of the department will be divided
between the departments with staff positions increasing from 4.75
to 5 full-time equivalents.

"There was a clear, overall
sentiment [of faculty members] to split," Andersen said. "We asked
the faculty who are there right now to choose which of the two
departments to join." The allocation of permanent billets was
proposed by the dean's office in advance of Andersen's meetings
with faculty members individually, he said, "because we didn't want
people competing for those who were undecided."

The intellectual issue for
anthropologists involved "a basic disagreement over what
constitutes science," Yanagisako said. "Physical anthropology is
rooted in an evolutionary paradigm and views itself as a natural
science, as does archeology in the United States.

"Social-cultural anthropologists try
to understand diversity without placing it into an evolutionary
scheme," she said, and believe that "interpretive and qualitative
methods, including the production of fine-grained ethnographies of
particular cultures, are necessary in order to do a science of
culture. You can trace both back to Franz Boas but they have
diverged."

Anthropology in the United States
was conceived of as a four-field discipline, Durham said:
physical/biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, archeology
and linguistics. "In principle and when the parts function with
coherence, a four-field approach has validity, it has rationale and
it works. . . . But perhaps for reasons related to our
[departmental] split, we have failed to produce a unifying theory
of culture, a unifying philosophy of culture, a way of
understanding cultural systems . . . so that has left the core of
the discipline a bit hollow, and it has sent people into disparate
corners looking for something."

The distinctions between the two
proposed departments' approaches are obvious from the opening
paragraphs of their descriptions of themselves, Anderson, a
chemistry professor, said. "The word biology is missing from one,
whereas it is central to the other, and I gather that reflects
tendencies nationally."

The Cultural and Social Anthropology
Department statement notes that its faculty are "leading
contributors to our understanding of ethnic, subnational, religious
and linguistic conflict and gender inequality in the world today."
One of the values of their kind of work, it says, is in "analyzing
why global integration of the economy has not resulted in cultural
homogeneity and why those whose cultural assumptions are different
from people in the U.S. may have a different understanding of
international issues."

The Anthropological Sciences
Department writes that it "takes as its subject matter the nature
and evolution of our species." Faculty members' specialties and
interests include human origins and environmental adaptations,
hunters and gatherers, tools and technology, biological and
cultural evolution and diversity, historic and computational
linguistics, applied anthropology, gender, materialism, social and
psychological anthropology, and ethics. "The department is united
by a common interest in the interrelations of biology, culture and
environment," its statement says.

National
splintering

Anthropology departments in many
U.S. universities face similar disagreements between people in the
four traditional subfields, said Patrick Kirsch, an archeologist at
the University of California-Berkeley who is a visiting fellow on
campus this year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences. "Anthropology has been a very broad field because of its
attempts to have a holistic perspective" on human culture, he
said.

Because of the breadth of its
approaches, anthropology has been the only discipline to qualify
for government funding in both the sciences and humanities, notes
Jim Gibbs, professor emeritus of anthropology at
Stanford.

But faculty are often pushed by
diverging methods and theories to seek colleagues outside their
departments more than within it.

"Archeology has gone in one
direction," Durham said. "Biological anthropology, with the advent
of molecular techniques, is off in another. Social and cultural
anthropologists, taking a lead from hermeneutics and the study of
meaning systems from European anthropology and from the humanities,
have gone in a very different direction. And finally linguistics,
which has always been an important part of the four-field system,
has also gone in different directions."

The result, he said, is that
"without something in the middle like a unifying theory of culture,
a unifying science to hold things together, these developments have
a great centrifugal force and things have been flying apart at high
speed."

The split of the department at
Stanford, Kirsch suggested, may even be a "symptom of a need to
realign social sciences," just as various branches of biology have
been realigned in some institutions. Changes in the world such as
economic globalization and the human population's impact on the
environment also play a role, he and others said.

Duke University already has two
separate departments of anthropology, and at many other leading
universities, single anthropology departments have semi-autonomous
wings. Graduate admissions and curricula are typically separated by
subfield, and faculty interaction in seminars across fields is
often minimal.

Compromises and
conflict

Kirsch chaired a visiting committee
that reviewed the Stanford department in 1996 and considered
recommending the division. The committee eventually recommended
steps to help increase linkages within the department because at
that time "we were swayed by a number of faculty in both camps who
said that they wanted to bring themselves closer
together."

Faculty members agree there has been
both compromise and conflict within the department over the
department's direction. "Tensions were evident with my own hiring
in '77 when there was disagreement over the need for someone who
does evolutionary thinking," says Durham, who is well known for his
theory of cultural and biological co-evolution. "My position was
regarded as very moderate and I think that was, in the end, what
helped."

Questions about the appropriate role
of biology in the department, he said, were "put back on the table
but in the middle of the table" a few years later by former Dean
Norman Wessells, a vertebrate biologist, who was impressed by
developments in early human evolution research and proposed adding
two billets for biological anthropology. Yanagisako and Durham both
said that some in the department viewed Wessells' proposal as
positive, while others viewed it as an administrative intrusion
that would dilute the focus of a department that was only about
half the size of others ranked in the top 10. In 1995, the
department failed to agree on an appointment in
paleoanthropology.

Tensions grew in the fall of 1996
after then chairman Renato Rosaldo suffered a stroke and the
faculty couldn't agree on his successor. The provost appointed a
faculty member from outside the department to run it. Later that
year the faculty agreed unanimously to recommend cultural
anthropologist Akhil Gupta for tenure, but the appointment was
rejected by the dean's office, a decision that Gupta and others
argued was tainted by conflict over the department's direction. He
eventually received tenure and will be rejoining the faculty next
fall following a sabbatical this year.

Since its beginnings in 1948, the
department was "somewhat unique in being established as a
department with an overwhelming focus on cultural and social
anthropology, although it had some minimal but distinguished
representation from linguistics and from archeology," said Gibbs.
Older departments, such as those at Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley,
Penn, Michigan, Arizona and New Mexico, all had four subfields, he
said.

Today, most older departments also
are less numerically balanced than in the past, Kirsch said,
because funding increased for the behavioral sciences after World
War II and expanded the numbers of people doing research on the
cultural side. Many departments no longer have specialists in all
four subfields.

Today, about 70 percent of the
members of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) are
socio-cultural anthropologists, and other subfields have developed
their own professional organizations, Yanagisako said. "There has
been a move by the AAA to bring back more of the other
subdisciplines. I'm also on the AAA executive committee and these
same troubles we see at Stanford go on there."

Numerous articles have documented
the fractious nature of debates at national meetings and
conferences of anthropologists in recent years. The extremes of the
field have been represented by people who use biology to explain
complex human behavior such as crime or colonialism, much to the
dismay of the cultural anthropologists, while the physical
anthropologists are equally disturbed by some cultural
anthropologists who seem to deny there are any universal biological
constraints on culture, according to a critique last year in the
magazine The Nation.

"The schools of thought that reach
out of anthropology reach way out," said Professor John Rick, an
archeologist who has strong methodological connections to
researchers in earth sciences. "We cross wide disciplinary
boundaries from philosophy to biology, and to trace out those
influences is a huge and controversial undertaking."

Gibbs gave a concrete example of
change over time. When he started out in the '50s, he said,
"cultural anthropologists were looking for generalizations, testing
hypotheses and making comparisons across cultures" by looking for
correlations between, for example, horticulture and certain
child-rearing practices.

"It was acceptable to check a
proposed hypothesis by looking up the specific practices in a
massive data bank on 400 or so cultures, something known as the
'Human Relations Area Files.' You didn't read the whole file on a
culture. You just looked up specific topics. Now that's a
questionable approach because you are taking material out of
context and assuming a certain comparative legitimacy. To the
extent this is not what cultural anthropologists do any more, the
discipline operates a little less in the traditional mode of
science."

Both Gibbs and Rick say they would
have preferred the department had stayed one but that it was
probably not realistic. "It's a little bit like a divorce, and the
new divorce says, 'Finally, now I have my life back. Whether it
will work out as well as hoped remains to be seen," Gibbs
said.

Said Rick: "I don't think overall
it's a good thing, but it is probably necessary at this time. If it
will allow the two departments to operate with a degree of freedom,
that should enable both of them. In an ideal world maybe through
growing strength and confidence we can rebuild
connections."

An alternative proposal was to have
two wings of the department put forward faculty appointment
requests without the other wing's unanimous consent "I argued that
would only exacerbate tensions and contribute to a hostile
environment," Yanagisako said. Both proposed departments have been
authorized to conduct faculty searches, she said.

"Although we face a split with some
degree of disappointment and sadness," Durham said, "there are also
great new opportunities for very different forms of inquiry to go
forward and follow their own paths." SR